We are lucky to have wonderful speakers at our meetings and this month was no exception! As a result it was a pretty full turn out of members to hear our guest speaker, press photographer, Peter Macdiarmid. Having been in the industry for 35 years, working for the main newspapers, Reuters UK , Getty Images and now his own business, Peter talked us through a gallery of photographs, 1 taken for each of those 35 years. His portfolio of images took us down memory lane, covering politicians of the day, royalty, wars and riots and charted not only this snapshot of history, but how photography, technology and news broadcasting has changed in that time. Each picture was individual, stunning and thought provoking, some had been taken after many painstaking hours and at different angles, some by shear luck – being in the right place at the right time; many had graced the front pages of newspapers.
It was an extremely interesting evening that gave us an ‘aperture’ into a press photographers’ ‘field’ & a ‘subject’ that ‘captured’ our audience’s ‘focus’.
Peter asked for his fee to be donated to The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity and, along with our raffle takings, we donated a fantastic sum of £360!